Peter Sacks

Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change it (Perseus Publishing, 2000)

Standardized Testing: It's an innocuous sounding term, isn't it? Straighforward, inexpensive, tidy, fair. Americans have grown so accustomed to filling in the "bubbles" on standardized tests that people often don't bother to question the tests' legitimacy.

But these seemingly innocuous rites of passage are neither straightforward, tidy, nor fair.
STANDARDIZED MINDS explores the nation's unhealthy and enduring obsession with standardized testing in schools, colleges and workplaces and how this tool of the so-called meritocracy affects us all, from the day we enter kindergarten to when we might apply for a new job or seek a new profession.

But while providing a vigorous critique of America's testing culture, STANDARDIZED MINDS also explores proven alternatives too such testing and ways to make the American meritocracy more accurate and fair to all people.

While we often hear about the growing economic divide between the rich and the poor in America, Tearing Down the Gates locates the fountainhead of these growing economic disparities, our education system, and shows how the widening class divide results in an untold loss of human talent that will derail the American Dream --not just for some, but for us all.